There is no RationalWiki without you. We are a small non-profit with no staff – we are hundreds of volunteers who document pseudoscience and crankery around the world every day. We will never allow ads because we must remain independent. We cannot rely on big donors with corresponding big agendas. We are not the largest website around, but we believe we play an important role in defending truth and objectivity.

If everyone who saw this today donated $5, we would meet our goal for 2020.

Two wrongs make a right is a logical fallacy that occurs when wrongs committed by one party are used to excuse wrongs committed by a second party. If it is asserted that the action is justified, because the other party did the same action, then the fallacy is tu quoque.

The fallacy is commonly used to justify actions, perhaps most noticeably in conflicts between countries and ethnic groups. Palestinians and Jews alike can point to perceived injustices committed by the other side, in some cases stretching in to the distant past. This same pattern can be seen in arguments over the Crusades in which Muslims and Christians attempt to attribute blame by citing slights committed by the other side.

In 2010 BBC News published a news story relating personal experiences with the sharia police of Aceh, Indonesia.[2] Burhanuddin, one of those responsible for passing the law, offered two arguments to justify the stoning to death of adulterers:[note 1]

"Sharia law acts as a deterrent in Aceh. We need it."

"China has a death penalty, so does America. They even detain people without trial there. Why do people only point the finger at Aceh?"

The first argument may be valid if there is a demonstrable benefit from the institution of the law, but assuming that the death penalty is wrong, the second is an example of the two wrongs make a right fallacy. Furthermore, the respondent makes a false equivalence as the question was about stoning people to death for infidelity, a rather worse form of capital punishment than those used by China or the U.S. and neither of these countries impose the death penalty for infidelity at all. It also ignores the fact that plenty of opponents of capital punishment actually do criticize the U.S. (as the only Western country that still executes people) and China (for its sheer volume of executions), so the claim that "people only point the finger at Aceh" is simply wrong. Indeed, to most opponents of capital punishment, Indonesia and Aceh are not at all an issue of concern.

While the appeal to hypocrisy could be applied to various hawkish politicians (see John McCain), it's still a deflection from the fact that a war under a false (even imperialist) motive doesn't justify another one, this time by an opposing power.[note 2] The argument started to peter out after the MH17 disaster.[6]

“”The operation cost just under $500, and no one was killed, or even hurt. In that same time the Pentagon spent tens of millions of dollars and dropped tens of thousands of pounds of explosives on Vietnam, killing or wounding thousands of human beings, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. Because nothing justified their actions in our calculus, nothing could contradict the merit of ours.

—Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers, defending a bombing attack by the Weathermen on the Pentagon.

A comparison is valid so long as the request or action can itself be justified without relying exclusively on a comparison. If asking for rights that are afforded to another group, one has to explain why anyone should have those rights in the first place. In the example of civil rights protesters asking for access to education, they would be guilty of a fallacy only if they could offer no good reason why anyone should have similar access.